Lorrie Moore - Like Life

He coughed and didn’t turn around. “I want to prove to my parents I’m not a fuck-up.” Once, when he was twelve, his father had offered to drive him to Andrew Wyeth’s house. “You wanna be an artist, dontcha, son? Well, I found out where he lives!”

“It’s a little late to be worrying about what our parents think of us,” she said. Rudy tended to cling to things that were beside the point — the point was always too frightening. Another train roared by, and the water beneath them wafted up sour and sulfuric. “What is it, really, Rudy? What is it you fear?”

“The Three Stooges,” he said. “Poverty, Obscurity, Masturbation. Also the three E ’s. Ennui. Anomie. Misery. Give me one good reason why we should go on living.” He was shouting.

“Sorry,” she sighed. She pulled away from him, brushed something from his coat. “You’ve caught me on a bad day.” She searched his profile for an emotion, one that had found dress but not weapons. “I mean, it’s life or nothing, right? You don’t have to love it, you only have to—” She couldn’t think of what.

“We live in a terrible world,” he said, and he turned to look at her, wistful and in pain. She could smell that acrid, animal smell hot under his arms. He could smell like that sometimes, like a crazy person. One time she mentioned it, and he went immediately to perfume himself with her bath powder, coming to bed smelling like her. Another time, mistaking the container, he sprinkled himself all over with Ajax.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“Yes,” she said, fear thick in her voice. “Can we go back now?”

He would sit among them with great dignity and courtesy. “You must pray to this god of yours that keeps you so well. You must pray to him to let us live. Or, if we are to die, let us then go live with your god so that we too may know him.” There was silence among the Englishmen. “You see,” added the chief, “we pray to our god, but he does not listen. We have done something to offend.” Then the chief would stand, go home, remove his English clothes, and die (picture).

GOZ WAS IN the ladies’ room again, and she smiled as Mamie entered. “Going to ask me about my love life?” she said, flossing her teeth in front of the mirror. “You always do.”

“All right,” said Mamie. “How’s your love life?”

Goz sawed back and forth with the floss, then tugged it out. “I don’t have a love life. I have a like life.”

Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love — love and its desire for itself — a husband and wife like two army buddies with stories and World Series bets.

“It’s pure, it’s stripped, it’s friendly. Coffee and dispassion. You should try it.” She ducked into one of the stalls and locked it. “Nothing is safe anymore,” she called out from inside.

MAMIE LEFT, went to a record store, and bought records. No one had been buying them for years now, and you could get them for seventy-five cents. She bought only albums that had a song with the word heart in the title: The Vernacular Heart, Hectic Heart, A Heart Is Just a Bicycle Behind Your Ribs. Then she had to leave. Outside the dizzying heat of the store, she clutched them to her chest and walked, down through the decaying restaurant smells of Chinatown toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The sidewalks were fetid and wet, and the day was warm, as if spring had already come. Everyone was out walking. She would stop at the clinic on the way home and drop off her jar.

She thought of a dream she had had the night before. In the dream a door in the apartment opened up and suddenly there were more rooms, rooms she hadn’t known existed, a whole house beneath, which was hers. There were birds living inside, and everything was very dark but beautiful, room after room, with windows open for the birds. On the walls were needlepoint samplers that read: Die Here. The real estate agent with the scarf kept saying, “In this day and age” and “It’s a steal.” Goz was there, her blond hair tipped in red and growing dark roots. Tricolor like candy corn. “Just us girls,” she kept saying. It was the end of the world, and they were supposed to live there together, as long as it took to die, until their gums felt strange and they got colds and lost their hair, the television all dots and snow. She remembered some sort of movement — bunched and panicky, through stairwells, corridors, dark tunnels hidden behind paintings — and then, in the dream, it untangled to a fluttering stasis.

When she reached the bridge, she noticed some commotion, a disturbance up ahead, halfway across. Two helicopters were circling in the sky, and there was a small crowd at the center of the pedestrian walk. A fire truck and a police car whizzed by beneath her on the right, lights flashing. She walked to the edge of the crowd. “What is it?” she asked a man.

“Look.” He pointed toward another man, who had climbed out over the iron mesh and crossbeams, out to the far railing of the bridge. His wrists were banded in black, and his hands held on to the suspension cables. His back arched and his body swayed out over the water below, as if caught in a web of steel parallelograms. His head dangled like someone crucified, and the wind tore through his hair. In the obscured profile, she thought she could make out the features.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

“The woman in front of us says he’s the guy wanted for the Gowanus Canal murders. See the police boats circling down there?” Two red-and-white speedboats were churning up water. One of the helicopters hovered noisily above.

“Oh, my God,” Mamie said again, and pushed her way through the crowd. A white heat burst in her brain. A police motorbike pulled up on the walkway behind her. A policeman with pistols got off. “It’s someone I know,” Mamie repeated to people, and elbowed them aside. “It’s someone I know.” She held her purse and bag in front of her and pushed. The policeman was following close behind, so she pressed hard. When she came to the place directly across from the man, she put down her things and lifted her knee up onto the rail, swung her leg over, and began to crawl, metal to skin, toward the outer reaches of the bridge. “Hey!” someone shouted. The policeman. “Hey!” Cars sped beneath her, and an oceany wind rushed into her mouth. She tried not to look down. “Rudy!” she called out, but it seemed feeble in the roar, her throat a half throat. “It’s me!” She felt surrounded by sky, moving toward it, getting closer. Her nails broke against metal. She was getting closer, close enough, soon, to grab him, to talk to him, to take his face in her hands and say something about let’s go home. But then suddenly, too far from her, he relinquished his grip on the cables and fell, turning, his limbs like a windmill, vanishing into the East River below.

She froze. Rudy. Two people screamed. There was a whirring noise from the crowd behind her, people pressed to the railings. No, not this. “Excuse me, m’am,” shouted a voice. “Did you say you knew this man?”

She inched backward on her knees, lowered herself to the walkway. Her legs were scraped and bleeding, but she didn’t feel them. Someone was touching her, clamping hands around her arms. Her purse and bag were still where she’d left them, leaning against the cement, and she jerked free, grabbed them, and began to run.

She ran the rest of the way across the bridge, down into the ammonia dank of a passageway, then up again to an old ruined park, zigzagging through the fruit streets of the Heights — Cranberry, Pineapple — along the hexagonal cobbles of the promenade, along the water, and then up left, in a ricochet against the DON’T WALK lights. She did not stop running even when she found herself in Carroll Gardens, heading toward the Gowanus Canal. No, not this. She ran up the slope of South Brooklyn for twenty minutes, through traffic, through red lights and sirens, beneath the scary whoop of helicopters and a bellowing plane, until she reached the house with the bird feeder, and when she got there, scarcely able to breathe, she sank down on the concrete lip of its fence and let out a cry, solitary and strangled, into her bag of songs.